One day Japanese director Chie Hayakawa was working on a screenplay and decided to submit her idea to some elderly friends of her mother and other acquaintances. She asked him: If the government sponsored a free euthanasia program for people over 75, would you accept it? “Most of them said yes to me,” says Hayakawa. “They did not want to become a burden for others or for their children.”
According to Hayakawa, this seemingly upsetting reaction reflects Japan’s current culture and demographic situation.
In his first feature film, Plan 75, awarded a special mention at the latest Cannes film festival and set in the near future, the Tokyo government offers elderly and lonely people an institutionalized death and group burial. State officials cheerfully propose this solution as if it were a trip.
“If the government tells you to do something, you do it,” Hayakawa, 45, explained during an interview in Tokyo on June 10, on the eve of the film’s first screening in his country’s cinemas. According to the director, following the rules and not burdening others are cultural imperatives typical of Japanese culture. With a passionate touch, Hayakawa addressed a very sensitive issue in Japan, the oldest country in the world, where about a third of the inhabitants are at least 65 years old and the number of centenarians out of the total population is the highest on the planet.
In addition, a fifth of people over 65 live in solitude and the country has the highest share of people with dementia in the world. As the population continues to decline, the government risks facing a shortage of pension funds and difficult questions about how to care for older citizens.
Leading the country, among other things, are politicians over the years, while the media give ample space to sweetened stories about the happy aging of fashion gurus or sponsor commercial products for older consumers. Yet for Hayakawa it is easy to imagine a future in which older citizens will be marginalized from society and the law, an idea that the director says is already widespread in Japan. Euthanasia is illegal in the country, but occasionally rises to prominence in criminal contexts. In 2016, a man killed 19 people living in a disabled center on the outskirts of Tokyo in their sleep, arguing that they should have been eliminated because “it was difficult for them to live alone or be active in society”. That affair gave Hayakawa the idea for Plan 75. “I don’t think it was an isolated case,” she explains. “That idea was already circulating. I am afraid that Japanese society is becoming a very intolerant society ”.
Kaori Shoji, an art and film journalist for the Japan Times and the BBC, after seeing a preview of Plan 75 she stated that the film didn’t seem dystopian at all: “Hayakawa just tells things as they are. She especially she makes us understand where we are going “.
This hypothetical future is all the more credible in a country where there are those who die from too much work, explains Yasunori Ando, professor at Tottori University and expert in spirituality and bioethics: “The idea that euthanasia is accepted is not at all impossible”.
◆ ** 1976 ** Born in Tokyo, Japan, the daughter of civil servants.
◆ ** 2001 ** He graduates from a photography school in New York, United States, where his children are later born.
◆ ** 2008 ** Back to Tokyo and enrolled in a film school.
◆ ** 2013 ** Shoot the short film Niagarawhich the following year is selected at the Cannes film festival.
◆ ** 2022 ** Your film Plan 75 receives a special mention in Cannes and is distributed all over the world.
Hayakawa spent much of his adult life contemplating death from a very personal perspective. When she was ten she discovered that his father had cancer (he passed away ten years later). “It was my formative years, so I think that aspect influenced my idea of art,” she says.
Daughter of two civil servants, Hayakawa began drawing stories and writing poetry from an early age. In elementary school she fell in love with the film The river of mud, the story of a poor family living on a barge. Directed by Kōhei Oguri, it had been nominated for the best foreign film at the 1982 Oscars. “In that story I found the feelings that I could not express with words. So I thought I wanted to make films ”. Hayakawa enrolled in the New York School of Visual Arts film program, convinced that she would receive a better education in the United States. But she, due to her poor command of English, she after a week she decided to move to the photography department, thinking that she would not need to speak the language well to get ahead.
The teachers appreciated his curiosity and work ethic. “If I accidentally mentioned a movie,” says Tim Paul, Hayakawa’s photographer and mentor, “she would go home and rent it. If I was talking about an artist or an exhibition, she immediately did research. She had great momentum and exceptional determination ”.
After graduating in 2001, Hayakawa had two children in New York, but in 2008, together with her husband, the painter Katsumi Hayakawa, she decided to return to Tokyo, where she began working for the private satellite channel Wowow, contributing to the adaptation of some US films for Japanese audiences. At 36, she enrolled in an annual film program at Tokyo night school, continuing to work during the day.
His final project for film school in 2013 was the short film Niagarathe story of a girl who after leaving the orphanage discovers that her parents had been killed by her grandfather and that her grandmother had not died in a car accident with her mother and father but was still alive.
Japan in ten years
In 2014 Hayakawa presented her film at Cannes in a category dedicated to student works, and was surprised when it was selected.
On the occasion of the festival, the director met Eiko Mizuno-Gray, a film press officer who invited her to make a short film on the theme “Japan in ten years”. The film would have been part of an anthology produced by the famous Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, author of A family business, awarded with the Palme d’Or in 2018 in Cannes_. _
Hayakawa had already developed the idea of Plan 75 for a feature film, but decided to make a short version. While he was writing the script he woke up at four in the morning to watch movies. Among the most important influences he cites the Taiwanese director Edward Yang, the South Korean Lee Chang-song and the Polish master of arthouse cinema Krzysztof Kieślowski. And after work she spent a couple of hours writing in a bar while her husband took care of the children, a relatively rare dynamic in Japan, where women usually take care of the house and children much more than men. After her 18-minute short film was released, Mizuno-Gray and husband Jason Gray teamed up with Hayakawa to develop a more extensive script.
When the filming of Plan 75 the pandemic had already begun. “In some countries, the lives of the elderly were suddenly no longer the priority,” Hayakawa points out. “In a certain sense, reality has surpassed fiction”. ◆ as